Ocean Glories II continues our annual deep dive into the world’s largest, yet most imperilled habitat – the ocean – which we started with Issue 345. And whilst we celebrate many of the wonderful creatures (including some writers in this issue) who call the ocean their home, we cannot, collectively, continue to ignore the mounting threats to this fragile ecosystem.
In our Ecologist pages, our conservation writer Roman Goergen investigates the alarming spread of rabies in seals off the coast of South Africa, where beaches have now been closed to the public, and Charlotte Sterland explains how even the slightest shift in salinity can threaten the survival of a creature as overlooked as the sea urchin.
As we were putting these last pages together, the heartbreaking news broke of a decline in health of thousands of gray whales off the coast of California, with emaciated animals who, according to marine scientists, are clearly starving to death, and producing very few calves. The researchers fear we may be witnessing another species ‘die-off’, which is a softer word for extinction. I say news broke, but similar stories about starving whales did the rounds last year, and probably the year before that…
If you want to know why they are starving to death, they are starving to death because of us and our lifestyle choices. With the polar ice caps melting at an unprecedented rate, feeding conditions in the Arctic are parlous (which translates to there is less algae to fertilise the ocean floor), so these whales are already in poor shape when they set off on the arduous 12,000-mile journey to their breeding ground off the coast of Mexico.
And in the same news cycle – and again, explored in this issue – we have headlines like “Miners are desperate to excavate the deep ocean. Could Trump help them?” This was a headline in Prospect magazine. Excavate…
Some protest is ongoing, and as part of that we are sharing artist Emma Critchley’s ‘Rights of The Deep’ – a letter co-written with fellow campaigners that is part of her Soundings project.
Also in this issue, we welcome, for the very first time in the pages of Resurgence & Ecologist, David Attenborough, who celebrated his 99th birthday with the release of a new film called, simply, Ocean. In our Slow Read he captures the challenges of filming the magnificent blue whale for his TV show 25 years ago.
And finally, if you don’t already feel deeply connected to the clarion call to protect our ocean, read sailor Hannah Stowe’s word to her unborn son.
Here is a taster of what she shared with that new soul:
“The water through which we sail is both ancient and new – moving, moving, constantly cycling. Cooling, heating, sinking, rising. Evaporation, falling as rain, soaking into and through the earth, eventually cycling back to ocean. The water through which we sail has been around the world and back, but never before has it been here, in this moment, with us.”
Ocean Glories II invites us to ask what could have been different if we had heard and heeded these warnings 25 years ago or more because the ocean’s decline really isn’t news – it’s become a refrain we keep on ignoring.
@susanresurgence.bsky.social
